Lighting Assignment

I posted a painting of a boy and a wolf in a snowy mountain landscape a while ago, I just finished with the lighting of it and handed the assignment in. The snow in general was a really tough challenge, just trying to figure out how the light would react to it. The trees and forest parts were also a big challenge, in the foreground especially for how to make them look detailed when they are covered in snow which essentially is kind of flat. In the end I am most happy with the mountains, although they aswell posted a great challenge, wat I am least happy with would be the trees in the foreground.

Overall this was one tough assignment for me, especially since I rarely, if ever, paint landscapes and have very little experience in painting environments. Anyway, that's enough talking for today so here it is.

Shoulders

I got some really good feedback on how to improve my edge flow of the shoulders even further (thanks Nat!) and I have tried to adapt it towards that. I know that there are a lot of triangles on the back and thought about fixing that, but I remember one of our teachers saying that triangles should not make a difference since the computer triangulates everything anyway. Therefore I decided that I wanted to keep control of how they triangulate.

I am sure that there are still things that can be improved upon the shoulder but I feel that I have gotten a long way and have probably learned a thing or two about modeling shoulders.

Apart from the edge flow I have worked in z-brush to rotate her high-poly arm into position and adjusting the shoulder so that it looks good. After that I went back into Max to adjust the lowpoly just to fit the high-poly better.


I also added some muscles to her arm as from the feedback we have been given, some people do not understand the vision we had about creating contrast with size, so we wanted to see how it would look with some more muscles. We felt that the result made her character design better and decided to keep it. Therefore I had to do some alterations in Max, adding some geometry and moving vertices around. While I was working on the arm anyway I also tried to define her elbow just a little bit more to enforce the style we want to achieve.

This might seem to have taken a lot of time, which it did, but most of the day I have been busy writing lore, some of which you can read on our team's dev blog today. We are planning to do a series of lore posts, this was the first one giving a short introduction to Tamarrion herself. You can read it here: https://tamarriongame.wordpress.com/2015/10/16/lore-day-1-tamarrion/

Solutions

After two days or so of doing not much other than finding problems we have now, finally, started to find some solutions both with Tamarrion and the environments.

After yesterday's problems with Tamarrion's mesh I restarted after being unable to find a solution but the problem occurred again after saving the file. I had hoped that I could keep the skin data so that I could adjust the arm before rotating it to get a more accurate result but it turned out that that was just not going to happen.

What I had to do was to start with using the rig to rotate the arm slightly, although I could not move it a lot as there was to much deformation of the upper arm, which is the exact problem that I wanted to fix. It took a lot of thinking and moving vertices but I somehow started to make sense of the messy chaos that were her shoulders and ended up with something that is not too bad looking.

There are some stars and weird shapes going on in certain places, but I have left that since she will never be seen without her armour. I was advised to try and clear some polys that go underneath the armour as well so that I will not have to skin more vertices than are necessary to hold the shape.

The good thing is that after redoing the typology of the shoulder I will probably never create a bad shoulder again, at least not the front of one, the back is still somewhat of a mess and a mystery.

Tamarrion Update

Due to lack of time and experience there are some issues with Tamarrion's model, mainly her shoulders. There is something that never got quite right with the skinning and the bare one is looking weird which I mentioned in my previous post where I attempted some fixing.

It turned out that the problem was bigger than first anticipated and we finally were told where the problems were coming from. Not only was it due to the skinning and A-pose, but the typology not being organic enough and following the muscle structure.

This means that to fix her I need to redraw the typology, rotate her arms up a bit, adjust the rig slightly before shaping the armpit and finally redoing the skinning and at least part of the textures. I started with redoing the typology today and have at least started to get somewhere with the front of the shoulder.

Of course that led to new problems as Max decided to have a party with the skinning layer and left Tamarrion as a complete mess. I was hoping to use the skinning just to rotate her arms but I might just have to give that thought up.

We have a lot to do and a lot to think of as a dissonance is occurring between the characters and environments and we have found several issues that need to be addressed. I am just glad that we have found them so early on and not later.

Problems

Today has been a marvellous day of setbacks. Apart from successfully adding some widgets to our blog the day has been full of nothing but problems.

I have been looking at updating Tamarrion's model to fix her shoulders but there have been problems with the length of the arms, shaping the shoulders, the rig and the skinning. That means pretty much everything.

Without having found any solutions yet I am a least aware of a great deal of issues now and I'll leave you with some pretty pictures of todays adventures with Tamarrion!

Boss Sneak Peek

So this is yet another sneak peek, this time it is not of Tamarrion but the new boss character that she will be fighting in a near future.

I have been working on this character while doing other school and Tamarrion related assignments for a few weeks now and she is starting to come to life. I started working on a base mesh in Max over the weekend and today I finished sculpting her upper body in Z-Brush. There is still a lot to do, but I just wanted to post a little update to show what i have been working on.

If you want to know more about Tamarrion just visit our facebook page or our website that is now up and running!
https://www.facebook.com/tamarrion
http://tamarriongame.com/

Sneak Peek Update

A while ago I posted a sneak peek of the new Tamarrion painting that I have been working on. It is starting to come together now and part of it will be found on our websites as a header. I just need to finish it off and perhaps spend just as much time on a background, but with other assignments as well it will have to take its time.

Those of you who have been watching my stream have followed me almost up until this step, but here is what it is looking like right now, the biggest difference from last stream being that I have reworked the sword quite a lot.

You can read more about Tamarrion on our facebook page and our Devblog, we are also working on a landing page although at the moment it is only possible to sign up and there is very little information yet.

Flat Colour Assignment

This week's 2D assignment was to colour the line art we produced last week, only using colour blocks. It has been quite a challenge actually since we were forbidden to use lighting and only allowed to work with colour blocks as my entire scene is covered in snow. I might work some more on it before doing lighting next week, but this is how it turned out.